GREECE 97 MYSELF : I learned with surprise that the Asclepieion of Athena was quite small. . . . CLEMENCEAU : It is. But the temples of the Golden Age are minuscules, and the Asclepieion must be practically contemporary with the Acropolis. That's what con- stitutes the triumph of those people; they guessed that the key to the problem wasn't size but harmony. They were the only race who understood that. The Egyptians with their pyramids—what were they seeking ? They may pile stone upon stone, yet even by breaking their backs they cannot hope to scale the Heavens. The Greeks did not look for their solution in space but in the mind. And after the Asclepieion, which is so lovely in the evening by moonlight, with the children playing all round it, after the Parthenon, which has been so mistreated, which has inspired so much literature, you will see the Pnyx, Martet. The Pnyx reveals things. An old altar to Apollo—yes, that's all—made with artificial soil, so that the Athenian cobblers might determine the fate of Demosthenes. MYSELF : And Crete ? CLEMENCEAU : Crete ! Now and then, in the night, when Fm unable to sleep, I see Phaistos again. It's some- thing that's fixed in my memory. • Ah, Greece, Martet. You must travel by way of Greece to get anywhere you're going. I believe that humanity reached its highest point there, easily, joyously. At Rheims, amongst all those Gothic sculptures, which are very fine and which one can't help admiring, there are two statues—copies of Roman things, probably, badly conceived, badly executed. Well, when you notice the folds of the draperies, which fall in that rhythm which the Romans stole from the Greeks, you're numbed, you can't see anything else—nothing but those two statues which are there as if in exile. There's nothing beyond Aeschylus, nothing beyond